1. Field of Endeavor
The present invention relates to droplet sorting and more particularly to chip-based droplet sorting.
2. State of Technology
Microfluidic devices are poised to revolutionize environmental, chemical, biological, medical, and pharmaceutical detectors and diagnostics. “Microfluidic devices” loosely describes the new generation of instruments that mix, react, count, fractionate, detect, and characterize complex gaseous or liquid-solvated samples in a micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) circuit manufactured through standard semiconductor lithography techniques. These techniques allow mass production at low cost as compared to previous benchtop hardware. The applications for MEMS devices are numerous, and as diverse as they are complex.
As sample volumes decrease, reagent costs plummet, reactions proceed faster and more efficiently, and device customization is more easily realized. By reducing the reaction volume, detection of target molecules occurs faster through improved sensor signal to noise ratio over large, cumbersome systems. However, current MEMS fluidic systems may only be scratching the surface of their true performance limits as new techniques multiply their sensitivity and effective throughput by ten, a hundred, or even a thousand times.